By Fatima Mamadu
Five years ago, I found myself in an unfamiliar environment: an Islamic school where Arabic was taught. Learning Arabic was my main reason for attending, but the experience became far more than an opportunity to learn a language. It challenged everything I thought I understood about education, womanhood, culture, and the choices available to young Muslim women. I arrived expecting to gain a skill. I left with a different understanding of myself.
To make sense of why that year unsettled me so deeply, it helps to know where I came from. As the eldest of four children, I grew up with a strong sense of responsibility. My parents often called me their “Deputy Parent,” because I was expected to lead by example and pave the way for my younger siblings. Having immigrated to Ghana and built their lives from the ground up, they wanted to instil in us the values that had carried them: independence, responsibility and hard work. In our home, ambition was not a luxury but an expectation. I understood from an early age that the choices I made would set a precedent for those who came after me.
So I was unprepared for what I encountered at the school. Here was a different understanding of what an educated Muslim girl’s future should look like. Some of the girls were already married; others intended to marry before they had finished secondary school. What surprised me most was not the fact of marriage itself, but the feeling behind it. Some seemed more excited about beginning family life than about continuing their education or developing themselves as young women. Marriage was not, in itself, a problem; it is a meaningful and valued choice for many. What I struggled to understand was why personal development and educational ambition so often appeared to take a back seat, as though the two could not travel side by side.
I often found myself challenging these ideas, and my questions were not always welcome. Because so many of the people around me shared the same perspective, my different outlook marked me out. I felt, at times, like an outsider, someone whose way of seeing the world did not quite fit the room she was standing in. At the time, this was difficult and isolating. But discomfort has a way of teaching what comfort cannot. Being the one who thought differently forced me to examine my own assumptions as closely as I was examining everyone else’s, and to ask where my beliefs had come from in the first place.
That question led me somewhere I did not expect. Before this experience, I had wanted to become a lawyer, largely because it was prestigious and because I wanted to make my parents proud. These were not bad reasons, but they were not entirely my own. Spending a year in that environment helped me see that an ambition built only on external expectation is a fragile thing. If I could so easily absorb my family’s hopes for me, then the girls around me had, in their own way, absorbed the hopes of theirs. None of us had arrived at our views in a vacuum. The difference was simply which environment had shaped us. That realisation did not make me abandon my ambitions, but it changed their foundation. I began to understand the importance of developing my own identity, questioning the social norms I had taken for granted, and making decisions about my future that were genuinely informed rather than merely inherited.
Looking back, what my parents once regarded as a mistake became a blessing in disguise. Stepping outside my comfort zone exposed me to perspectives that challenged my thinking, and the challenge did more for me than agreement ever could. It taught me that decisions which seem wrong at first can become some of our most valuable lessons, helping us approach life with greater maturity, empathy and realism. I learned to understand people whose choices differed from mine, rather than simply to judge them, and in doing so I came to understand myself more clearly.
Ultimately, our environment can shape how we think, but it does not have to define who we become. We are formed by the places we grow up in, the people who raise us, and the expectations we are handed, yet we are not imprisoned by them. We can examine what we have inherited, keep what is ours, and gently set down what is not. Sometimes, the places where we feel least understood are the very places that teach us the most about ourselves.
